Peace at last

Here's a excerpt from my latest Mini Book, "Peace!". Not a particularly long or exciting excerpt, but you can't have everything. If you want to see the bulk of it you'll need to be either lucky (get one of the free copies) or lay down some dosh.



Once the dust had settled after WW I, average gravity had dropped by about 10º from its pre-war level. It remained at around 1043º until 1931, when a big rise in beer duty (from 80s to 114s per standard barrel) prompted brewers to cut gravities to avoid increasing the price of a pint. The tax increase was reversed in 1933, but gravities never got back to their old levels, remaining around 1041º.

The uneven approach of brewers to the tax increase - dropping the gravity of some styles, such as Mild and Porter, increasing the price of others like Bitter - widened the gap in strength between the cheap and expensive beers. In 1923, Whitbread's X Ale had an OG of 1042.1º and its PA 1046.4º. In 1933, X was 1036.1º and PA 1048.8º.

Aside from that one little blip in the early 1930's, beer tax was remarkably stable in the interwar period, remaining at 80s per standard barrel from 1924 onwards.

This table gives an overview of beer output and taxation between the wars:

British brewing overview 1920 – 1939
	Production (barrels)	Production (hl)	Average OG	tax per standard barrel	Net excise receipts (pounds)
1920	35,047,947	57,358,068	1039.41	70s	71,276,230
1921	34,504,570	56,468,799	1042.61	100s	123,406,257
1922	30,178,731	49,389,304	1042.88	100s	121,844,583
1923	23,948,651	39,193,404	1042.72	100s	92,262,893
1924	25,425,017	41,609,566	1043.04	80s	76,110,638
1925	26,734,825	43,753,145	1043.12	80s	75,825,827
1926	26,765,610	43,803,527	1043.23	80s	76,320,021
1927	25,100,461	41,078,410	1043.28	80s	78,763,480
1928	25,435,145	41,626,141	1043.17	80s	77,800,471
1929	24,608,000	40,272,468	1043.10	80s
1930	25,061,956	41,015,395	1042.90	80s	71,254,674
1931	23,900,000	39,113,784	1042.50	114s
1932	20,790,812	34,025,411	1041.04	114s	68,710,020
1933	17,950,303	29,376,748	1039.52	80s	67,097,581
1934	20,182,308	33,029,558	1040.99	80s	53,884,405
1935	20,864,814	34,146,520	1041.06	80s	53,582,335
1936	21,969,763	35,954,835	1041.02	80s	55,451,926
1937	22,724,450	37,189,926	1041.10	80s	57,318,585
1938	24,205,631	39,613,967	1041.02	80s	61,241,404
1939	24,674,992	40,382,105	1040.93	80s	62,370,034
Sources: Brewers' Almanack 1928, p. 110 Brewers' Almanack 1955, p. 50